The original poster for Little Miss Marker (1934) implies this pre-code film was targeted at a male audience with wolf’s eyes for chorus girls. The featured image is that of Dorothy Dell, a Hollywood starlet and former beauty pageant winner who appeared in only three films before her death. The movie studio generated a second poster that implies the film was aimed at Depression-era families in need of some good news in the form of a cheerful, cute and hopeful 5-year-old sweetie named Shirley Temple.
The movie itself is the first Hollywood version of a Damon Runyon short story published in 1932. It’s a sentimental yarn about the wise-cracking inhabitants of a gangster-controlled bookie joint where fixing horse races is part of the business.
The Runyon short story is a breezy fable full of insider references to the time and the place: gangsters, dames, nags, and speak-easy saloons. The dollop of sentimentality is provided by the unexpected appearance of a 5-year-old kid whose father leaves her as a “marker” for a horse race bet.
She is taken in by the bookie Sorrowful Jones and his minions when it appears her father has disappeared, which means that Dad has also welched on the $20 bet. In Runyon’s telling, the kid brings a brief undamaged respite into the lives of sad people. When the child dies of pneumonia, Sorrowful walks away “never looking back” but leaving behind “a very great silence … that is broken only by … some first-class sobbing from some of the rest of us.”
Two years after publication, the short story became a movie. Changes to the plot were introduced as a voluptuous nightclub singer of undetermined age (Dorothy Dell, age 19 in 1934) was added to the story. She is the chief squeeze of the nightclub owner Big Steve (Charles Bickford, age 43 in 1934). Our singer also has a soft spot for Sorrowful (Adolphe Menjou, age 44 in 1934). The singer’s name is ‘Bangles Carlson’, and she takes a liking to the kid Marky. Bangles convinces the gangster types to do ridiculous things to cheer Marky up, such as throwing a party and dressing as King Arthur’s court complete with a resplendent racehorse “charger.” At the shindig, the horse unexpectedly rears upright – frightened by Big Steve’s menacing presence. This causes the kid to fall (serious injuries are implied). In the operating room (the injuries are not discussed in detail), the kid (who still looks great) is saved by a blood transfusion from (take a guess) Big Steve.
It is a happy ending with a clear indication that Bangles and Sorrowful will perhaps marry – despite the 25-year age difference – and adopt the ‘marker’. The on-screen chemistry between Sorrowful and Bangles is non-existent, but audiences were pleased. Shirley Temple would go on to make 39 feature length films from 1932 until 1949. She was the world’s Top Box Office Star in the mid-30’s, surpassing Clark Gable.
Dorothy Dell (1915-1934) appeared in three films, all released in 1934. Little Miss Marker was her second movie. She died at age 19 from injuries suffered in an automobile accident.
Adolphe Menjou (1890-1963) started as an extra in Hollywood in 1914. He went on to gain 114 screen credits, most notably in Paths of Glory (1957) and The Front Page (1931).
Charles Bickford (1891-1967) would earn three Academy nominations during his long career in film, all for Best Supporting Actor. The story of our little “marker” was too good for Hollywood to walk away from. Bob Hope made a version called Sorrowful Jones in 1949 with Lucille Ball. In 1962, Tony Curtis played a casino manager suddenly in charge of a 5-year-old girl in 40 Pounds of Trouble, and in 1980, Walter Matthau and Julie Andrews remade Little Miss Marker.
Damon Runyon (1880-1946) was a New York newspaperman whose most famous short stories profiled the city during Prohibition. Other films adapted from his stories include Lady for a Day (1933), The Lemon Drop Kid (1951), Guys and Dolls (1955), and Pocketful of Miracles (1961). “The Damon Runyon Theater” on radio featured 52 of his short stories in weekly broadcasts that ran in the 1940s and 1950s.
